knolli wrote:As I said, it is one thing to have a given number of character cards in your deck. It is a totally different thing to have a big pool of cards (the sum of every card you collected) where you choose your deck from. What I said about characters applies to any other type of card, too. When I still played MTG, I spent nearly as much time preparing my deck as I spent playing. And do make a good costumized deck you need a big pool. A collection of 1000 cards (including doubles) is small for most TCGs.

When building your deck most of the time it's: "Tam is strong, but Tim is faster. And Tom has this neat ability, but lacks defense. ..I think I will put Tod in my deck, because he goes well with the [other card]",or: "The Bloodthirsty Axe does the most damage, but the Swift Daggers also improves the speed stat. Or should I put the Scythe of Decapitation in my deck? It adds the [special ability], but the initial bonus is small. No, I will use the Greatsword of Legends that gives additional bonus when equipted to a [specific character]."

That's why you need to create ten times more cards than are actually used for a game. And if you are planning to make individual sprites for Tam, Tim, Tom and Tod there is much work waiting for you. And maybe they will never be selected for a game.

Also, I disagree with knolli a bit. 1000 cards seems like a lot. You probably only need 200-300 different cards, and maybe even less. That should be a good starting point and then you can add more as you go. This is also based on deck size, as the bigger the deck size, the more cards that are needed.

Zupponn wrote:Also, I disagree with knolli a bit. 1000 cards seems like a lot. You probably only need 200-300 different cards, and maybe even less. That should be a good starting point and then you can add more as you go. This is also based on deck size, as the bigger the deck size, the more cards that are needed.

I didn't say that we have to aim at the 1000 right from the beginning. After about five year of playing and collecting that was the size of my Magic collection, including more than hundred Lands. And my collection was small compared to other's. Right now the number of different Magic cards ever printed is over 100,000. We don't have to go that far. Magic has had twenty years to grow that big.

To launch the first beta, one complete deck of only one Color should be sufficient. This is mostly to test the basic rules, the flow of the game, to learn where it should be simplfied. When that's done we can make decks of the other Colors and start beta phase two. Here we test how well the Colors work togeher, which cards and abilities need tweaking. For official release we should aim at three times one deck's size (for each Color). We can always add new cards later.